Session D5 - Recent Developments in Computational Nuclear Physics.
INVITED session, Saturday afternoon, May 01
Governor's Square 14, Adam's Mark Hotel
Understanding the production of nuclei and nuclear energy in astrophysical environments requires as input quantities the rates of many nuclear reactions, but only a small fraction of the cross sections required for nuclear astrophysics will ever be measured in the laboratory. Nuclear astrophysics will therefore always depend on nuclear theory to supply rates fundamentally inaccessible in the laboratory, to extrapolate measured cross sections to different energies or mass numbers relevant for astrophysics, and to resolve discrepancies where there are conflicting laboratory data. Recent years have seen the development of the ``realistic'' nucleon-nucleon interactions that provide excellent descriptions of nucleon-nucleon scattering up to the pion production threshold. Computing wave functions and matrix elements based on these interactions is computation-intensive, even for the nuclei of atomic weight twelve or less for which calculations are feasible with present computers. Consequently, development of the interactions and currents has gone hand-in-hand with development of the computational methods to compute nuclear wave functions and interaction matrix elements based on them, particularly the quantum Monte Carlo and correlated hyperspherical harmonic methods. These developments provide an excellent opportunity for nuclear astrophysics, and they have been applied fruitfully to several reactions of astrophysical interest. I will review these advances in the descriptions of light nuclei and their reactions, as well as their application to specific reactions of interest for the astrophysical problems of solar neutrino production and of the synthesis of light nuclei in the early universe.